The seminar aims at exploring both the evidence and the conceptual tools on the basis of which we read the so-called ‘Presocratic philosophers’. How can we analyze philosophy in the making, before it became a discipline in its own right? We consider a large sample of primary texts and sources related to prominent early thinkers such as Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles, and discuss them in the light of specialized scholarship; but we also try to find our way among a variety of theoretical approaches (philosophical, historiographical, etc.).
